Private nonprofit colleges are increasingly using tuition resets, or a decrease in sticker price by at least 5%, to attract new students and counter declining demand. While discounting tuition with institutional aid is a common practice to get accepted students to matriculate and to increase affordability, a tuition reset is a more transparent…

The report examines how enrolled undergraduate students and parents of undergraduates view higher education and how they pay for it. The report considers education funding sources--from parent and student income and savings to scholarships, grants, and borrowed funds--and evaluates trends in payment strategies over time. This 17th edition provides…

The paper studies the impact of financial aid on long-term educational attainment and labor market outcomes in Colombia. In 2014, the government launched a large-scale and generous student loan program called "Ser Pilo Paga." It offered full tuition coverage to students admitted to one of 33 government-certified high-quality universities…

Pell eligibility for incarcerated people is a great rehabilitative opportunity, but several challenges remain. This article recaps five of the issues identified by the original research articles in this special issue. It also considers how solutions proposed in these studies may be beneficial across a variety of these issues and gathers…

New Jersey's state grant program delivers the highest level of need-based aid per student in the country. And the state's major grant program, the Tuition Aid Grant (TAG), funds all eligible students, rather than excluding students when the funding runs out. But different levels of grant aid for enrollment in different institutions within sectors,…

This report presents findings from Encouraging Additional Summer Enrollment [EASE], which used behavioral insights in two informational campaigns, with and without tuition assistance, to encourage community college students to take summer classes. Both interventions increased enrollment and had a modest impact on credits earned and positive return…

To address concerns about the public postsecondary education offerings available to District of Columbia residents, the District of Columbia College Access Act of 1999 (P.L. 106-98) established the District of Columbia Tuition Assistance Grant (DCTAG) program. The program is meant to provide college-bound DC residents with a greater array of…

Existing state policies to support the costs of apprentices' classroom training at colleges are a patchwork. Some states have implemented effective subsidies to support credit-bearing apprenticeship offerings without any cost to the apprentice; other policies are well-intentioned but counterproductive. Across the country, though, many states…

A changing economy in Michigan means that education beyond high school, whether it's a degree or training for a specific skill or job, is more important than ever. But in Michigan, low- and middle-income families are seeing college costs continue to rise--for many, rising beyond their reach. Michigan has some of the highest public tuition levels…

After the abolition of student maintenance grants in 2016, higher education bursaries will be the major source of non-repayable aid for poor students in England, with £300 m spent per year. The aims of the bursary system were never explicitly laid out by government, making it challenging to evaluate this unique form of aid. In this paper, I…

Tuition discounting at four-year private, nonprofit colleges and universities has been on the rise for several years. This practice, which colleges and universities use to provide institutional grants to students who are unable or unwilling to pay the full tuition and fee price, allows institutions to meet multiple institutional goals, including…

One way in which financial aid is thought to promote college success is by minimizing the time students spend working. Yet, little research has examined if this intended first-order effect occurs, and results are mixed. We leverage a randomized experiment and find that students from low-income families in Wisconsin offered additional grant aid…

Tuition discounting (TD), a practice whereby institutional grants are used to subsidize a student's educational expense, has become a common practice at four-year institutions. TDs impact on enrollments, financial aid, and budgets continues to increase, raising concerns about the long-term sustainability of the practice. Drawing upon Breneman's…

This paper compares partial and general equilibrium effects of alternative financial aid policies intended to promote college participation. We build an overlapping generations life-cycle, heterogeneous-agent, incomplete-markets model with education, labor supply, and consumption/saving decisions. Altruistic parents make inter vivos transfers to…

The national commitment to increasing postsecondary educational attainment, combined with growing economic anxiety, has made community colleges the focus of many federal and state policy initiatives. There is good reason for this: by virtue of their nature and reach, community colleges--public institutions of higher education that predominantly…